Game Discussion of the Week: Doom: Eternal

Never played eternal but it looks pretty much like more of the same as Doom 2016 which I thought was alright but incredibly over hyped. might of enjoyed it more if it had the Quake branding which it plays a lot more like rather than Doom. For me the last real Doom game was Doom 64 which I see as the real Doom 3.

I have yet to play Doom 2016, much less this one. I've heard it's really good though.

Excessive rambling incoming. I tried to filter out the nitpicks because I want to talk about the broader subjects.

First off I want to say this game runs like butter. The visuals are pretty too of course (lots of nice environments in this game by the way), but it's refreshing to see a game so well optimized. Even the loading screens seem to be over in a flash, and I don't use an SSD. I don't know what kind of occult magic they use to run this game, but I want to see more games make use of it.

Doom Eternal's combat can best be summed up as strafing through arenas, doing your best to avoid & kill enemies while waiting for your cooldown timers. This doesn't sound bad on paper, and in fact it's implementation isn't half bad either. If you pretend Doom Eternal is it's own completely separate entity, the idea of frantically running around chopping dudes up to replenish your guns while dodging projectiles sounds like it would make a kickass arcade game. The problem is how the gameplay has changed since the 2016 entry, and how it makes me fear what a sequel to this game would look like.
See, before the first nu-Doom was released, a section of shooter fans(myself included) were less than enthused upon seeing gameplay footage of glory kills. The fear was that cinematics and gimmicks would get in the way of actual gameplay. This wasn't really the case upon playing it though, because while glory kills and chainsawing were both cinematic and gimmicky, they were unobtrusive enough so that you could spend most of your time fighting normally, and only occasionally fall back on them.
Eternal on the other hand, adds more of these gimmicks and separates them into categories based on what resource you're trying to replenish. It wasn't a big deal in 2016, but now the game revolves around this goofy shit. Right away, the critical aspect of resource management takes a hit, since all of these methods can be used again after their respective cooldown timers are finished. The designers aren't idiots though, and I suspect that things like the modest health/ammo capacity were made to combat this. By the halfway point though, you have access to all of these abilities and have likely upgraded everything to a point where resource management effectively doesn't exist and most fights start to blend together.

Speaking of upgrades, there are so many concurrent upgrade paths in Eternal it's insane. On the one hand, it's not bad to have a real incentive to explore the level or complete a challenge. Once you start cashing in all these tokens and doodads, and you start looking at all these different upgrade trees, it feels like the designers just threw everything at the wall to fill space. This game is severely uncomfortable letting the player go for too long without getting some sort of upgrade or collectible. It comes off as a cheap attempt to keep the player in a positive feedback loop, which I feel is a running theme in this game. I imagine that the difficulty curve was made with the intention of ramping up to match the character's upgrades, but in my experience that just wasn't the case. I played on nightmare ffs.

Another mechanic from Doom 2016 that was turned up to 11 is weak points. This however, was executed fairly well, aside from a few exceptions. There's no good reason to kill a cacodemon with anything other than a grenade to the mouth->glory kill, it's not hard to do and anything else is just wasting resources. The Arachnotron is a less egregious but still suffers from this kind of design. One well placed shotgun grenade or sniper shot and the main threat is gone. These 2 were strong additions in the enemy roster of the former game, so gimping them does not do Eternal any favors. Other enemies however, have multiple weak spots, so they can't be easily declawed or killed in an average combat situation.

The thing is, Doom Eternal isn't necessarily a bad game if you look at it as it's own separate entity. The problem, again, is that it emphasizes all the things that held back Doom 2016, and embodies some of the trends that plague shooters today. There are a few times where everything comes together, but these moments are much more sparse then they were in the last game.